Paperbacks from Hell Wins the Stoker Award!

I am so excited to tell you that Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell (Quirk Books, Sept 2017), the book inspired by Too Much Horror Fiction and for which I did much research, organizing, identifying, brainstorming, and also wrote an Afterword, won the 2018 Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction. What an incredible thrill! After the nomination was announced, there was no way my wife and I were going to miss a first-time trip to the StokerCon at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, RI. It was literally a whirlwind weekend—never had time to get to HPL's grave, sadly—and Friday the whole region was beset by a ravaging Nor'easter, and practically trapped us all in the hotel, just like in a King novel! Enjoy some of the pix from that weekend.

Grady took our selfie right after we won. What an indescribable rush. "Jesus fucking Christ," I whispered aloud to myself when the book was called out as the recipient of the award. Talk about satisfaction and a weird kind of relief. All our work culminated in that moment!

At the after-party. You can see how good it feels.

Can't get enough pictures with this thing!

The list of nominees at the dinner banquet. We had some real competition and I certainly wasn't convinced we were going to win no matter what some very kind fans were telling us. However I feel no one has ever celebrated horror fiction the way that Paperbacks from Hell (and Too Much Horror Fiction) has!

Another hoped-for event actually occurred: at the awards after-party—emphasis on party, it was loud, energetic, and fun!—Grady and I got to chat with Thomas F. Monteleone and Douglas E. Winter, whose critical, editorial, and fictional contributions to the horror genre in the 1980s and '90s were vastly influential on me. We got into some fun anecdotes about people like Michael McDowell, Whitley Strieber, Dennis Etchison, and others, while I got to gush at Tom about how much his Borderlands series meant to me as a horror reader back in the day. Check out Grady's deathgrip on both the Stoker and his beer.

 (I did not take this pic)

Alas, there was only one award given, with Grady's name inscribed, so it was his to take home. I don't want to think about the night of passion that followed.

As I do in every new city I visit, I try to find the used bookstores right away. These pics are from Cellar Stories, only a block from the Biltmore. I know several attendees shopped there, so I can only imagine their paperback horror section is now a barren wasteland!

In the dealers' room we signed some copies of the book. I will never get tired of this.

Setting up Saturday afternoon for Grady's performance of Paperbacks from Hell. This was the first time I'd seen it myself, and everything I heard about the song about skeletons was true.

Saturday night, Ramsey Campbell and Caitlin Kiernan announcing the Stoker for Best Novel (which went to Christopher Golden for Ararat).

View from the stage, pic taken by Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press, who won a Stoker for Specialty Press. I'm over on the left throwing the devil horns. What a happy, loud, enthusiastic crowd! Drinks were flowing freely I can tell you that.

This was one of the best nights, late Friday with booze and snacks, hanging and drinking with (L-R) author Adam Cesare, director of the StokerCon Final Frame Film Competition Jonathan Lees, and Nate Murray of IDW Publishing. There were plenty of other warm, friendly, funny, brilliant folks I met, and many who were fans of both Too Much Horror Fiction and Paperbacks from Hell. I love hearing about others' experiences with old paperbacks and their intro to various writers and books. It was all incredibly gratifying and humbling. Got to see some great panel discussions on Bram Stoker and Dracula, on Shirley Jackson, on horror film of the '70s and '80s, and on the Universal and Hammer horror classics (although no one, not even Ramsey Campbell, mentioned one of my faves, The Black Cat). So much to do and see and talk (and drink and drink) about!

Early Sunday morning I myself was on a panel of vintage paperback horror fiction moderated by Grady. It was maybe a bit subdued; a weekend of conventioning and drinking and talking late into the night and freezing weather had taken its toll! There's Jonathan Lees again, and also Elizabeth Massie, whose '80s short stories I found and still find to be disturbing, brilliant, and filled with real human emotion. I talked about my beloved Dell/Abyss series as well as Queen of Hell (not so beloved) and Book of the Dead 2: Still Dead (still beloved).

And look who attended the panel: yes, that is indeed horror legend Ramsey Campbell! What an encouraging, approachable presence he was at the convention.

The Horrors Writers' Association seems to be just filled with extremely talented people dedicated to horror (and it made me realize I need to devote some time to contemporary horror writers). To finally mix and mingle among them as an equal is something I'm proud of. Being recognized by them, me, who began as an amateur fan with a free blogspot domain, a scanner, and an obsession for cataloguing the wonderful past of the genre I love, is an immeasurable honor. It's spurred me on to continue looking for the lost and forgotten horrors of the paperback past!

A dream come true.

Thanks to the awesome Jonathan Lees for this lovely pic. 

Women of Darkness, edited by Kathryn Ptacek (1988): Fear of a Female Planet

Featuring the usual distinctive orange typeface against a black background, Tor's Women of Darkness (October 1989) showed a refreshing self-awareness about the genre's tendency to overlook female writers when compiling horror anthologies. In her quiet and unobtrusive introduction, author and editor Kathryn Ptacek notes that she realized women were not being included in large or notable numbers in horror anthologies, for whatever reason, and decided to amend this. Odd that this was long an oversight, considering the genre was in large part begun by women—Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe—and continued through the century with Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson. Of course Anne Rice and V.C. Andrews were two of the most recognizable names on the horror shelves of the decade. Women of Darkness is a corrective which (I think, I hope) was and should still be embraced. While not every story could be to my taste, almost every one is very, very good, and deserves (re)reading.

Kathryn Ptacek w her husband Charles L. Grant

c. late '70s

To be honest, I remember little of reading Women of Darkness back then, which is a shame because a handful I would have loved. I bought it because I'd heard of two stories it contained that were splatterpunky efforts well worth a horror fan's time. These were Elizabeth's Massie's "Hooked on Buzzer" and Nancy Holder's "Cannibal Cats Come Out Tonight." Both are solidly of their time: the former features a young woman who'd been abused by a fundamentalist cult; the latter presents a young man abused by his father who befriends a rebel dude and together they meet a crazy-hot rocker chick. Massie's story seems inspired by Roberta Lannes's notorious "Goodbye, Dark Love" from Cutting Edge (1986), while Holder's resembles a little the edgy outsider world that Poppy Z. Brite would become praised for. This is not to say the two tales are lacking; I quite liked both, real exemplars of short '80s horror. Happily both women continue as successful writers today.

The late British fantasist Tanith Lee (pictured) is the most well-known author included; she provides one of her impeccably mannered historical tales, "The Devil's Rose," a darkly sensual (it is Lee, of course) work of a woman "obsessed by dark fancies, bad things. Unrequited love had sent her to perdition." Yes thank you. You all know how much I love Lisa Tuttle's short horror fiction, and "The Spirit Cabinet" is no exception. No time wasted in setup, first sentence: Frank and Katy Matson had no sooner moved to London than they found a haunted house. Katy begins seeing a seance from the dim past, but she finds the ghost charming, not frightening. She realizes she's the ghost, a future ghost for the 19th century seances she glimpses. As Tuttle often does, this clever, light-hearted setup is just a distraction from the horror to come. Wonderful, wonderful horror!

Many writers included are utterly unknown to me, but for the most part they contributed respectable stories. Nancy Varian Berberick's (pictured above) "Ransom Cowl Walks the Road" is a sort of horror-cozy about a serial killer in a small Jersey town. A little gruesome and little creepy, however I felt the first-person narration didn't quite work with the twist ending. Still, not bad. "True Love," by Patricia Russo, with its utter cliche of a title, is the kind of thing I'd have passed up back in the day; it's a short historical tale of a stranger stopping by a country inn, tales told by a fire, a feisty old lady as bartender, and a nasty finale straight out of EC Comics. Kinda cool still. I loved "In the Shadow of My Fear," Joan Vander Putten's effective poetic-noir that mixes murder and spooky oceanic imagery with a real bite of a climax. My Felicia floats, slave to the whim of the tides, ever straining at her anchor.

A handful of stories venture far from familiar shores. Her first published story, "The Baku" from Lucy Taylor (above) benefits from its exotic locale and mythology. In a tiny cold seaside Japanese farm community, living with her husband who's working in Tokyo, Sarah drinks and frets over losing him. Noting her distress, a local gives her a "baku," a tiny ivory figurine that "eats bad dreams" when you place it beneath your pillow at night. Man I loved this little shocker. In Karen Haber's "Samba Sentado" a humiliated wife flees to Rio after her husband takes up with another woman. She is haunted by him: Over the next three days, I learned to stay calm, not to betray my horror and disbelief each time Jim's body washed up in the surf. The title means "Dance of the Initiates," the narrator visits a medium, a ritual voodoo dance and trance is involved, and a new power embraced, with chilling implication. Well done. "When Thunder Walks" by Conda V. Douglas has its white protagonist meet a fate reserved for those who use Navajo culture for their own monetary gain. These cultures depicted felt lived and authentic; Ptacek's mini-bios of each writer reveal this to be the case.

Women are most likely to bear the emotional (and physical) burdens of family life; Women of Darkness proves this in both text and subtext. The antho begins with "Baby" by long-time speculative fiction author Kit Reed, you can guess the scenario: a woman is reluctant to visit her sister and her newborn, babies were revolting; love must make mothers blind. Elva is the modern woman in the city, glamorous, "a collector of men." But when sister Rilla promises to introduce Elva to eligible bachelors if she visits, Elva cannot resist. What she finds and learns in that home has her rethinking everything. Good stuff, generic end but hey when it works it works.

"Aspen Graffiti" is Melanie Tem's sensitive story of a marriage crumbling, a husband leaving a family and its effect on the couple's sons. Filled with tiny details that ring true (an argument in the K-mart shoe department), it's a sad, quiet, melancholy bit of domestic horror, which Tem has done so well so many times. A mother's boyfriend visits the ultimate violation on her daughters in "Sister," from someone named Wennicke Eide Cox. What could have been distasteful and unseemly is here delicate and sympathetic, yet with a grotesque climax that speaks of horror's everlasting torment.

You can just tell by its title that "Nobody Lives There Now. Nothing Happens," is going to be "literary," can't you? Creative writing professor Carol Orlock's (above) story was Bram Stoker-nominated for best short fiction in 1988; it lost to "Night They Missed the Horror Show." No matter; its intelligence and attention to the life of a neighborhood are reminiscent of Jackson, its spooky, matter-of-fact cadence recalls Anne Rivers Siddons, its mood of domestic mystery perhaps vis-à-vis Alice Hoffman. No one ever sees the Marquettes, who move into a monstrous Victorian home tinged by Gothic tragedy, but everyone wonders about them, especially the children that venture to their front door on Halloween. Orlock avoids generic convention but the story lingers still: The house still stands. It is empty now, but I remember the afternoon the Marquettes arrived. I remember it as more remarkable than it probably was.

"Slide Number Seven" by Sharon Epperson (pictured) invokes modern (or then-modern) fears of intimate disease, a very common theme in horror in those days. One need not use vampires to literalize the metaphor either, and Epperson's somewhat oblique telling gets right under your skin, natch, trapped in dirty, sweating, traitorous flesh. And a horror anthology by and about women could not be complete without a tale of twin sisters and the man who unwisely comes between them. This is Melissa Mia Hall's "The Unloved," and its final screech to a halt is a powerhouse.

Ptacek really did the genre a terrific service with Women of Darkness. What the anthology lacks is refreshing: there's no smart-aleck tone, no blasé attitude, no dick-swinging, no sniggering moments of sexualized violence, no one-upmanship. Nor is there much, if any, literary pretension; the styles on display are ones which evince maturity, not just in prose but in life: understanding—from experience—disappointment and heartbreak, longing, desperation, betrayal, unconscious notions of vengeance, not just the traumatic acrobatics of horror-loving, ham-fisted goons trying to replicate the latest slasher movie. You can feel these women's lives, the emotions are real, and the supernatural horrors that spring from them insidious and subtle. The stories are also utterly human. There is much to be feared from these women's darknesses, but also much to be learned.

Borderlands, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone (1990): Wake Up in the Night with a Fear So Real

An admission: I almost didn't read this one back in the day. The cover art of a skeleton driver at the wheel almost turned me off Borderlands (Avon, Nov 1990), the first in the anthology series edited by Thomas F. Monteleone. At that time I was just so over skulls and skeletons on covers, thinking that whatever was inside was just as cliched and tiresome. But I finally succumbed to that wonderful blurb from Peter Straub, had already enjoyed Wagner, Klein, and Lansdale, and so found Borderlands to be a terror treasure trove, stuffed with inventive, colorful, eclectic stories I remember fondly - well, I remember fondly that I enjoyed them almost 25 years ago. I've been wanting to revisit and review Borderlands since I began this blog more than three years ago....would it hold up on this reread?

Some of the titles have jumped around in my head for ages, as did a few of the authors names, both because some became favorites and others because they seemed to become nothing. What Borderlands offers is stories that feature all kinds and styles of horror, from the non-supernatural to the otherworldly, from the quiet whisper to the shockingly violent, from dark fantasy to urban realism, psychological thriller to fairy tale, gritty suspense to gothic decadence. There's something here for the proverbial everyone. This means you.

The tone is set, wisely, with the first story, "The Calling." It's by the recently late David B. Silva, who edited one of the essential horror magazines of the 1980s, The Horror Show (many of the writers in this antho sold their first stories to Silva). Grim and despairing and all too real: a man caring for his mother as she slowly succumbs to cancer. This is horror of humiliation and embarrassment, failure and resentment. With a delicate yet graphic touch, Silva deftly explores what we choose to ignore. The ending is the essence of horror. And I just learned "The Calling" won the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for best short story; no surprise there.

"Scartaris, June 28th" is Harlan Ellison in Deathbird Stories (1975) mode: What happens to gods after their last believers die? Here Ellison's anger and impatience are tempered by a more forgiving, more understanding nature. A nameless man wanders the globe, giving a cessation of suffering to some, simply a hard time to others who deserve to be confronted about their outmoded beliefs. Ellison drops arcane comparative mythology knowledge on the reader and it'll help if you know who Arne Saknussemm is. Ellison's story is the most sophisticated and ambitious of works here and it contains some of his finest-ever writing.

(Speaking of Ellison, Borderlands was also my very first introduction to Poppy Z. Brite, whom Ellison lauded to the sky and back. "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" is a goth-punk update of Lovecraft's "The Hound," both factors endearing her to me at once. I wrote about this story here.)

1994 reprint from White Wolf, cover art by Dave McKean 

It was a pleasure to reread tales I'd half-remembered: "Muscae Volitantes" by Chet Williamson, but mostly unforgotten since I've been plagued by the titular condition for years. A husband's lover threatens to reveal the truth to the wife. Surely the husband can see his way out of this untenable position? And things get wonderfully, maniacally surreal in "Oh What a Swell Guy I Am," a story Monteleone happened upon out of the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts he received. Jeffrey Osier, a regular contributor to small press mags like Deathrealm and The Horror Show, possesses a strong, passionate prose style; his bizarre images are conveyed fully formed, which resonated uncomfortably with me. In a good way. The title... is literal. Oh man, is it literal.

A quick stop in lycanthropy land, in which Les Daniels upends who's monster and who's man; like his other fiction, "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" uses standard horror tropes with wit and irony but is no less the horrific for it. Pure entertainment. John Shirley's "Delia and the Dinner Party" is part child's-eye view of the titular event and splatterpunk reveal, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman's creepy short-short "Stillborn" reminded me just a bit of the underseen 1990 film The Reflecting Skin, children obsessed with... well, no spoilers!
 

Ed Gorman's (above) "The Man in the Long Black Sedan" has a family man in the grip of madness - or utter calm rationality? - confront a most innocuous villain in a motel room. Gorman is more known for his crime fiction but wrote quite a few pulp-horror novels under the name Daniel Ransom. Likewise, "Suicide Note" by Lee Moler isn't necessarily horror but more dark erotic suspense, a man obsessed with carnality till the very end of life.

In a more general vein, two looming specters over horror fiction of this era appear in Borderlands: religious fundamentalists and sexual abuse/incest. Today these topics seem a little shelf-worn in fiction, tropes that inexperienced or lazy writers can trot out and use to push readers' buttons all too easily (it's not just in genre lit either you can be sure). But when these themes starting appearing in horror fiction it signaled efforts to make horror more serious, more real, more involved with the world at large than retreating into the vagaries of the imagination à la Lovecraft, say. These themes date Borderlands but negate it little.

Bizarre hands indeed

Fortunately their appearances here are for the most part handled with intelligence. And, yes, irreverence: Joe R. Lansdale's "By Bizarre Hands" trades in both businesses, riding the edge of irreverent black humor and down-home horror in his own inimitable style as a pedophiliac preacher/conman drives the dusty roads of Texas looking for simple-minded girls he can "save" with the Good Lord's help. Joe's story ends Borderlands on a very high note, no surprise there. And "The Good Book" from G. Wayne Miller works the Lord works in mysterious ways just right, I thought.

A handful of contributions leave the reader spooked but bewildered, such as "The Pounding Room" by Bentley Little (above). An author whose only work I've read have been this story, twice now. Neither read has gotten me interested in reading more of his stuff, but that's me. Obviously lots of readers like the inexplicability of this story, this style, revealing the unbelievable horrors that lurk behind, beyond, beneath the mundane. But to what end? Perhaps that's the point: the horror of incomprehension. He would become one of the big paperback horror writers of the turn of the century but oh well.

Nazis, chemical pollution, and the nightmare of a homeowner's lawn care make John DeChancie's "The Grass of Rememberance" an intriguing read; the connection of these disparate elements didn't quite come together for me. "Alexandra," from '80s anthology essential Charles L. Grant, was quite good but again, the ultimate intent seemed to dance away from me at the last moment. A subtle and powerful woman befriends an Oxrun Station physician. Cool, but you all know Charlie: it's what he leaves out that is probably the most important aspect of his fiction. Sometimes I wish he'd just left it in.

Works from my faves: several times Karl Edward Wagner (above) has written sensitively of the fallout of the Vietnam War; in "But You'll Never Follow Me" a veteran still beholden to his war-torn battlefield ethic must now deal with his aging, ailing parents. It's a sad, sad story, without a trace of the unreal, and the climax hits a lot harder today than it did in 1990. Read it, and see what I mean. Ouch.

In "Evelyn Grace," by Thomas Tessier, a young man feels up a female corpse in a funeral home. Then things get weird. This one ends with very nearly the most objectionable word in the English language... and it is oh so right. Another one outta the park for Tessier; he's batting 1.000 here at TMHF. The ever-welcome-but-rarely-seen T.E.D. Klein contributed one of his few short stories of the '90s, "Ladder." Fate is a gamesman, a wordsmith, trailing an Irishman as he travels the globe. Klein's sense of place and locale is impeccable, and his brand of Borgesian wordplay tickle the intellect but unsettle it too; surely we are not gamepieces for an idle god...

One of the more infamous short stories of its day - the impact of which I've never forgotten even if the specifics were vague - "Stephen" ruminates upon bodily disfigurement in several disturbing ways, none of which resort to the supernatural. Elizabeth Massie (above) knows that while it was once proper to look away from the physically unfortunate, we all want to stare. And stare she does, unblinking, sympathetic, but without pity. Anne Zaccaria volunteers at a nursing home for the disabled and learns to confront her own deformities - not of the body but of her mind, her past, her family - thanks to the title character. "Stephen" is perhaps the most emotionally wrenching tale in Borderlands, never faltering in places where a lesser writer may have stumbled into grotesque tastelessness - well, I suppose there's some grotesque tastelessness here, but that's life. Excellent stuff, and another Bram Stoker Award winner, for best long fiction.

When I solicited material for what I hope will be the first of many volumes, I made it clear I didn't want stories that employed any of the traditional symbols and images of the genre. I wanted writers to expand the envelope, to look beyond the usual metaphors, and bring me something new... They are all extremely well-written. Some stories will dazzle, while others will quietly subvert, but they will all reach down and grab for the soft parts.

So says Tom Monteleone (above) in his intro, and he really deserves kudos for his editing skill here - and I don't have room to go into everything included. There is an air of conviction in all the stories; every one means business, even the "lesser" stories. No juvenile hijinks mar the carefully crafted terrors, no lapses in the write stuff to break the spells cast. Even the tales that get under the skin in a surreal yet inexplicable manner are serious in intent and purpose but without that sense of literariness of, say, 1988's Prime Evil; it's not so high-minded as that anthology. Borderlands (and the subsequent volumes, of which I own only the second today) promises to take us far, and it does, oh it does. What you will see there you've not seen elsewhere, but it's a one-way trip. So be warned: you'll have to find your way back on your own.

Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1992): Everything that Dies Someday Comes Back

What distinguishes Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2 from its 1989 predecessor? Easy: better stories, better writers, more gore, weirder gore, surreal gore, and women. It really is that simple. In the three years that separate the two John Skipp and Craig Spector-edited zombie-thologies, in which every story is contained within the George Romero universe of zombie hell, several female horror writers had published well-received shorts and debut novels. Kathe Koja, Nancy A. Collins, Elizabeth Massie, Roberta Lannes, and perhaps most well-known of all, Poppy Z. Brite, are all accounted for in Still Dead, and it makes all the difference. Their stories here are original, inventive, risky, and astonishingly well-written. Nobody's trying to self-consciously out-gross anyone else, or prove how splatterpunk they are, or show how flip and casual they can be about brain-eating, dead children, and evisceration. Thank zombie Jebus for that.

Mark V. Ziesing hardcover, 1992

To wit: Massie gets down-home with graphic zombie sex in "Abed," and Collins brings the goth-punk kids to the show in "Necrophile." Koja's "Prince of Nox" imagines the other side: her protagonist becomes a zombie who, sadly, still maintains some semblance of sentience and goes on a quest to rescue his damned brethren. Nancy Holder presents a liberal zombie-theology in "Passion Play," in which an old German town wants to use a zombie as Christ in its traditional performance so it can be truly and literally crucified. Nice little Easter-appropriate twist at the end, too.

The lead-off story, "The Old Man and the Dead" from Mort Castle, by whom I've never read anything else, is one of my favorites in modern horror. Prefiguring the current bestselling craze of melding zombies with classic literature, Castle imagines a man - quite obviously Ernest Hemingway if you paid attention in your first-year literature class - who encounters in Spain the horror not of World War I, but of the walking dead.

"I don't think I like this," Adam Nichols said. "I don't think I like it at all."
"I am sorry, but what you like and what you dislike is not all that important, if you will forgive me for saying so," Miguel said. "What does matter is that you are a good shot. You are one of our best shots. So, if you please, shoot some of these unfortunate dead people."

Love. It. Douglas E. Winter returns with another grim parody of (then-) contemporary hip-lit, "Bright Lights, Big Zombie" (You are not the kind of zombie who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning), and Dan Simmons, a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time writer, takes "This Year's Class Picture" to autobiographical heights (or depths). The surreal gore turns up in Brooks Carruthers' "Moon Towers," to which I still remember the climax 20 years later; famed cartoonist Gahan Wilson has "Come One, Come All," a sort of Bradbury/Sweeney Todd mash-up, and Skipp and Spector themselves present an odd poem, "The Ones You Love."

But really this tome is owned by "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," Poppy Z. Brite's darkly poetic rumination on the nature of zombiedom and a strangely beautiful city besieged by filth and decay both natural and not. There's no real plot, just a decadent, luxurious, and deliciously gross sensibility:

The dead like pussy too. If they are able to catch a woman and disable her enough so that she cannot resist, you will see the lucky ones burrowing in between her legs as happily as the most avid lover. They do not have to come up for air. I have seen them eat all the way up into the body cavity. The internal female organs seem to be a great delicacy, and why not? They are the caviar of the human body. It is a sobering thing to come across a woman sprawled in the gutter with her intestines sliding from the shredded ruins of her womb, but you do not react. You do not distract the dead from their repast.

It's this sort of acceptance of horror and death that makes the tales of Still Dead believable, makes them linger, makes them sting; despite their visions of the human body in extremis, these stories are still about people, about men and women who matter-of-factly witness the worst the world has to offer, and continue on. It's not just the the dead who come back; it's living people too.

But I'm still not crazy about this cover, either.